In response to a shortage of physicians, six rural Maryland hospitals have banded together to implement a remote-monitoring system for patients in their intensive care units.
The hospitals, organized as Maryland eCare, will get video and audio communications, intelligent monitoring and alarm systems in their ICUs. Specialist doctors and nurses in Wilmington, Del., will use the technology to monitor ICU patients. In the event of a change in a patient’s condition, the Delaware specialists will alert the Maryland hospital and suggest corrective action.
The initiative means that nurses in Maryland ICUs will have immediate, around-the-clock access to a critical care physician. The program is expected to improve retention of nurses and ICU doctors, known as intensivists. Intensivists at the Maryland hospitals are less likely to be summoned for ICU emergencies when they are off duty.
According to officials at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, patients have better outcomes in ICUs staffed with intensivists. But many hospitals cannot employ enough of them to provide around-the-clock coverage.
CareFirst is providing a $3 million grant for initial expenses of the initiative. Without banding together and receiving the grant, the hospitals would not have been able to install the technology and obtain the monitoring services, according to a spokesman for the insurer.
Christiana Care Health System in Delaware will provide the remote monitoring. It uses the technology, known as eICU, in its own ICUs. eICU, from a company called VISICU, was developed by critical care physicians formerly associated with Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.
Requirements that doctors practicing in a state be licensed there sometimes are regarded as barriers to practicing telemedicine across state lines. However, Amy Lee, a spokesman for Maryland eCare, said the Delaware doctors will simply obtain Maryland medical licenses if they don't already have them.
The Maryland eCare hospitals are Atlantic General Hospital, Berlin; Calvert Memorial Hospital, Prince Frederick; Civista Medical Center, LaPlata; Peninsula Regional Medical Center, Salisbury; St. Mary’s Hospital, Leonardtown; and Washington County Health System, Hagerstown.
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
